Oh my goodness, this is a heck of a good book. It’s great legal crime, international crime, thriller.  I’m going to have to take James Grippando’s Jack Swytek series a bit more seriously.  I see by my blog that I’ve read four of this series over the years with a high enjoyment level.  But because I spaced them far apart and wasn’t going in any order I forgot about them.  

The Girl in the Glass Box
by James Grippando
Read by Jonathan Davis 11h and 18m
Rating – A / thriller–legal
#15 in the Jack Swytek series 

But in reader reviews I saw that this is his best, and I figured I might not forget.  The problem, as I recognized close to the end, is there’s a bit of tension over-load so I couldn’t read another one right away – and so I’d forget.  

Anyway, in The Girl in the Glass Box, Miami attorney Jack Swyteck, the eponymous protagonist of the series, is presented with the case of an undocumented woman who fled El Salvador to protect her daughter and save herself from gangs and an abusive husband.   

Julia Rodriguez and her teenage daughter Beatriz manage to get to some family already in Miami and start making their own lives. Then the somewhat independent and hot-headed Julia rejects her boss’s unwanted sexual advances. He calls ICE.  Suddenly she is arrested, locked in the US detention system, and slated for deportation. The only option for Jack is to try to get her asylum, a horrendously difficult case to make these days.

Meanwhile an old enemy from San Salvador appears to be following them and someone dies. The legal aspects get hairy and the chase begins.

Too often in mysteries or thrillers these days it takes 3/4 of the book before “something happens” and you get hooked. I was curious at about 1/10th here, hooked at 1/4. And Grippando is a master of tension building. Legal crime is not so much courtroom drama anymore and the books are more often thrillers than they are courtroom drama. This is top notch thriller. And the wee bit of humor is just the right touch. The narration is brilliant except that the name Julia (Hulia) is often sounds like it’s Julio (Hulio).